Remember the OLPC? That quirky little notebook that was going to cost $100 and change the world? The ill-fated project had incredibly high hopes but has not met with the success that its organizers would have liked. After receiving less orders than initially expected the project has lost a number of key staff members in high profile resignations and has seemingly lost much of its direction.

In another big move for the program the world’s children have thrown off the yoke of free and open source software. The OLPC will soon be featuring a specially modified version of Windows XP. This will increase the price of the system slightly (reportedly $3) and a dual boot option will be made available, but it goes against many of the program’s core values, or at least perceived values.

In the NY Times article founder Nicholas Negroponte is quoted saying “The people who buy the machines are not the children who use them, but government officials in most cases and those people are much more comfortable with Windows.” Which is a very pragmatic approach for such an idealistic program, but it may be what has to be done to keep moving forward.

Windows XP cannot fit on the OLPC XO’s 1GB of flash storage so a 2GB SD card is included as well. The versions of XP will be specially tailored to work with some OLPC requirements, like the e-book reader, but there is no word if it will support all features (like mesh networking).